Archive for the 'Software' Category

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Version 7.0.517.41 of Chrome for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux has just been released. This fixes a serious bug which causes the popular web browser to crash when an autfill form is used. A number of features have also been added, including updated HTML5 support.

Unfortunately one of the most wanted functions by the users is still missing, namely ‘print preview’.

Google have confirmed that this is indeed in the top ten of the requested features, but the company has been unable to add it since two years of the browser’s release.

BECTA (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) has announced that major white board manufacturers, including Promethean, Hitachi and SMART Technologies have agreed on a common file format – at last software created on one platform can be exported and used on setups from other vendors.

This means that content created by educators can be shared across platforms, thus reaching a wider audience. Thanks to this new agreement, a common file format (.iwb) has been created, as well as a viewer application with support documents and a code library. Some of the vendors are already supporting this new format in their software, while others will do so in upcoming updates.

Graphics software come in two flavours, bitmap or vector. The most popular commercial bitmap software is Adobe’s Photoshop with Gimp coming close on its heels as an open source alternative. For many years, Freehand was the only vector drawing program to be an industry standard, until Adobe bought Macromedia, the company behind it. Eventually Adobe killed off Freehand as it already had a similar software, Illustrator.

If you ever felt the need to retouch, edit or manipulate an image in any way, you would probably use Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately, this excellent, industry standard piece of software does not come in cheap so if you did not have access to it, you would have been left pretty much stranded – unless you knew about Gimp.

Gimp stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is an open-source paint program that can be used to perform complex tasks such as photo retouching and image manipulation or simply as a paint program. GIMP is growing in popularity at a rapid rate as a complete graphics package – it is free and a good substitue of Photoshop.